The World Wide Web is being increasingly used for personal, commercial and other communications. Typically, a user device, such as a desktop, notebook or netbook computer, a smartphone or an embedded device, accesses the World Wide Web using a browser on the device that communicates with a web server. The web server may be hosted by an enterprise, such as a retailer, financial institution, media enterprise, social networking enterprise, etc. The web server may run applications that are supported by the hosting enterprise.
In running a web server application by a browser on a device, it is often desirable to access services of a third party service provider. These services may include telephony-based services and/or Internet protocol-based services, such as Short Message Services (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS), IP Multimedia Services (IMS), email text-to-speech conversion, voice recognition, chat, retrieval of contacts, retrieval of database records, etc. In these cases, a secure connection may be pre-established between the web server and a Web Services Gateway (WSG) of the service provider. These secure connections can allow the web server to register the device with the service provider, so that the device can then log on to the service provider using its browser, and use the third party services provided by the service provider as part of the application.
A new phenomenon has recently emerged in the application environment: applications that run natively on a device rather than running through a host web server. These applications are commonly referred to as “apps”. For example, hundreds of thousands of applications have been written by large numbers of application developers to run natively on the iPhone® device. These applications may be compiled applications that run natively on the device, rather than running on a web server and interacting with the device using its browser. The proliferation of applications has made it possible for developers with limited resources to develop specialized applications that can run natively on a device without the need for the overhead of a web server.
Unfortunately, since these natively run applications need not use a web server, it has been difficult for service providers to be able to make their services available to these natively run applications. Thus, although these natively run applications could benefit from using service providers and the service providers could benefit from providing services to these natively run applications, it has been difficult for the service providers to support these natively run applications.